What Whites Get from Reparations

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Sometimes the best questions come from skeptics. In response to a recent post of mine on Reparations, a commenter asked such a question. What do white people get from Reparations paid to Black descendants of slaves to compensate them for systematic oppression of themselves and their ancestors over four centuries? The commentator (mohistory2) implied that whites get little, and that that’s why Reparations will never fly.

The short answer is that white people gain, too, because neither life nor democracy is a zero sum game. When people who’ve been kept down and out for centuries rise, everyone gains from the new wealth, new possibilities and new enthusiasm created. Workers and progressives, in particular, gain from new allies.

When people fight among themselves for scraps, their lot gets harder. That’s what American workers have been doing ever since organized labor started getting sucker-punched with so-called “right to work” laws, globalization and rampant exploitation of the poor and undocumented.

That’s the essence of it. The rich and powerful and the billionaires have been pitting various groups of workers against each other to keep them down for the entire history of this nation. Oppression of Black people, before and after slavery, has been by far the worst example. But it’s not the only one: consider eleven million, undocumented hard-working Hispanic laborers, each of whom can be deported with a phone call to ICE. What kind of rights have they?

Make the oppressed better off, and the rising tide raises all boats. (And no, this is NOT like trickle-down; it’s bottom up, not top down.) Let’s look at a few specific ways:

1. Worker solidarity. Why are workers in today’s US essentially in revolt? Why did they vote in droves for the Demagogue, who did virtually nothing to advance their real interests? Why are their wages, their working conditions, their ability to unionize and bargain collectively, their social safety net, and their prospects for the American Dream relentlessly slipping away?

The reason is simple. Although workers outnumber bosses by orders of magnitude, they don’t stick together. They fight among themselves and divide by class, race, ethnic group, type of work and even irrelevant things like abortion and guns.

Through their chief organ of propaganda and oppression—the Republican Party—the bosses relentlessly foster and foment this division. They feed on the petty resentments and jealousies that create it. That’s what keeps them on top.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Professor Howard Zinn, who wrote the must-read book on US history, called A People’s History of the United States. In it, he describes how bosses and their political lackeys systematically provoked inter-tribal conflict among workers at two key turning points in American history: the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of eventually successful labor organizing in the early twentieth.

Bosses fomented division and resentment among every ethnic group they could excite. They pit Polish and Greek immigrants against Italians, Jews and longer-resident native workers in big cities like Chicago and New York.

But the really big idea was the Black-White divide. The Great Migration of Black workers to the industrial North and Midwest was in full swing. Reconstruction was history, and Jim Crow and white terror had set in with a vengeance throughout the South.

So as Black people fled the South in the hope of improving their lives, Northern bosses and their pols convinced various groups of white workers that Black people were out the get their jobs. The resulting division and resentment held our national labor movement and unionization back decades. The only thing that eventually overcome them was the extreme economic suffering of the Great Depression and later our entry into World War II.

During the past forty years, the same division and resentment has fostered and promoted globalization, the so-called “right to work” movement in the South, and the failure to update minimum wages. All of these things have crushed workers and their families since the 1970s, right into our new twenty-first century. The recent failure of the unionization campaign at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama and the massive ongoing exploitation of gig workers generally are just parts of the trend.

In unity there is strength. That was the mantra of the labor-union movement in the first half of the twentieth century. It was hugely successful in building the American middle class until the right-to-work movement, the Black-white divide and eventually globalization broke it down. In order for that movement to rise again, the first order of business must be to heal the Black-white divide among workers. (Globalization is already on the ropes due to things like supply-chain unreliability, the efficiency of distributed production, and growing nationalization in industry worldwide.) Support for Reparations will help immensely, both by showing solidarity and by giving underprivileged Black workers the wherewithal to summon, organize and finance solidarity, and to hold the line.

2. A Massive, Durable Economic Stimulus. If Reparations go the way I’ve recommended, there won’t be any uniform, one-size-fits-all payment to every descendant of slaves. No one will be using Reparations money to buy a Tesla or take a sea cruise.

Every recipient will have to apply for Reparations individually and present a “personal business plan.” The plan might be anything that will improve lives and circumstances. It could be something like attending an Ivy League college that otherwise would be financially out of reach, moving out of the ghetto, starting a business, caring for sick child, sending kids to private school, or starting a nonprofit movement to improve the lives of descendants of slaves generally. But each grant recipient would have to stick to his or her plan to keep the money coming.

All this money will directly stimulate the general economy. It will be spent quickly, not saved or hoarded, to make the lives of recipients better. It will thus constitute a huge, ongoing stimulus for the general economy, including white-owned schools, shops and businesses.

If it works, the stimulus would not be a one-time thing. The primary purpose of each grant would be to help each recipient move into and stay in the middle class. If successful, that raise in economic status would make each recipient a permanent contributor to the general economy, at a higher level than before. To give just one small example, if you are white and own an upscale restaurant, you could expect to see many more Black people able to afford your meals regularly.

3. A Stronger Social Safety Net for Everyone. A century ago, there was no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or anything like welfare. On average, people died in their mid-fifties or earlier. We all live much easier, longer and more carefree lives today because we have a “safety-net” system that takes care of us when we are out of work, sick, retired, or disabled. Those of us on Medicare, for example, don’t have to be rich to afford the modern medical miracles that extend life and make it more pleasant. The Covid-19 pandemic, still in progress, showed us all how much we can suffer—even die—when our social safety net fails us.

Oligarchs and billionaires don’t need a social safety net. Even during the pandemic, they could retreat to their mansions in the country or abroad. They could have Covid-tested and masked doctors and nurses test and treat them at home. They could manage to get vaccinated by hook or by crook, including using their billions to jump the line.

The rest of us, however, need that safety net. And who among us needs it most? Those who have been oppressed, neglected, deprived, kept in ignorance and poverty and discriminated against for most of our history. Black people.

That means, if you want to strengthen the safety net, get things like higher wages, more generous unemployment pay, better and more free or low-cost medical service, family leave and more generous sick pay, then Black people are among your most reliable and effective social and political allies. They need it the most and they will, if they can, push it the most. And they and their ancestors have been at it for longer than just about anyone else.

The problem is that many Black people don’t have the time, money, know-how or leisure to organize and work to strengthen our safety net because they are constantly struggling to just survive. Give Black people a better chance to work, vote and plan for the common good, and they will do just that. The beneficiaries will be not just Black people, but all of us. If you want a more just, equal and fair society, then empowered Black people will be your most enthusiastic allies, whatever your own ethnicity.

4. Fielding All of the Team. Black people in our country are not just a tiny group. The are about one-eighth of us—some forty million people. Not all of them are descendants of slaves, but most of them are. So when we marginalize and neglect them and their talents, as we have throughout most of our history, we are keeping one-eighth of our team off the economic field.

Think about that for a minute. Whatever team sport you play now, or when you were young, think about how it would have fared if you had had to remove one-eighth of your players from the field at random. How much harder would winning have been?

That’s what we Americans have done for over four centuries. We’ve marginalized one-eighth of our people. We’ve neglected and misused their native talents by giving them inferior education, substandard food and housing, inadequate environmental protection, substandard financing and medical care, and few chances for promotion, not to mention incarcerating them at excessive rates. We’ve left a good part of one-eighth of our talent in the dugout.

Reparations are designed to help fix that. They’re designed to give descendants of slaves a chance to develop and use their full native talents, with as much education, opportunity, encouragement and nurturing as anyone else. If you don’t know what that means for winning economically for all of us, then you’ve never played on a team before.

5. Making Positive Change. So far, all these key points have little or nothing to do with politics. They’re mostly basic economics or common sense. But if you’re a white progressive or white Democrat, there’s yet another advantage to supporting Black people with Reparations.

Black people reportedly vote 80%-90% Democratic. Many need our safety net just to survive and avoid police brutality. By and large, they don’t have the luxury of voting on single issues like abortion, gun rights or enhancing the power and the reach of muscular Christianity.

The trouble is, a lot of Black people don’t register or don’t vote today. Their marginalized status has made it hard for them to see the benefit of politics. Many have become cynical and apathetic.

Getting out the vote can help. Stacey Abrams proved that by flipping Georgia. But so can Reparations. When marginalized poor and destitute people get a chance to move into the middle class, they start to think more seriously about voting and political organizing, if only to protect the gains they’ve made.

Reparations can accelerate this process, encouraging millions more Black voters to participate regularly in politics, as well as labor organizing. If you’re a white progressive or Democrat, they will become new and well-motivated allies. If you’re a white worker, they will walk the picket lines with you.

6. Decreasing Crime. Crime is a reliable product of poverty, neglect and hopelessness. Cure the underlying ills, and crime plummets.

This I know from personal experience. For eleven years I lived in a fully integrated middle-class neighborhood in Akron, OH. Working crazy hours, I would come home after trips to find FedEx packages sitting on my front porch. Sometimes I came home so tired that, the next morning, I found my keys in the outside lock of my front door. I never lost anything and never had any trouble from neighbors, all but one of whom (a poor white family) were delights.

The key to this happy story is the two words “middle class.” People of that description have too good lives and too much at stake to run this risk of crime, especially the nasty, violent kind. Bring the mass of poor Black people into the middle class, and you will see crime involving Black people plummet as never before.

That’s what Reparations will do. That’s what they are intended to so, no more, no less: bring the long-neglected one-eighth of us up to same standards that the rest of us enjoy, no more, no less.

Conclusion. So no, Reparations are not just a giveaway to Black people. They are not just a means of finally fixing our original sin. They are investments in our nation and our collective future. They are investments that are long overdue. But now, at long last, the time seems to be right.

Reparations will bring many Black people who’ve never felt fully a part of our system into powerful participation in our economy, our society, and our politics. Having their full participation will benefit all of us immensely, whether we’re white, Black, brown, red or yellow.

Black people have always banked on us coming to our senses. And recently they have saved us when we almost lost our way. I will go to my grave believing that Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina saved us (almost singlehandedly) from submitting to the Demagogue and losing our democracy forever. He did so by getting South Carolina to bring Joe Biden’s primary campaign back from near death, with a huge turnout of Black voters.

The best reason for whites to support Reparations is that it’s the right thing to do. And the chance for all of us to work together to achieve these ends might yet blunt the selfish credo of Ronald Reagan: “It’s your money.” It could stop our slide toward an each-for-his-own society, which in two generations has driven us into our appalling and unprecedented state of general decline.

If we Americans continue to fight each other over scraps, our destiny will be dismal. We’ll be no more secure than the ethnically fractured Afghan government in the face of a united Taliban, or a disunited Europe, with Britain fleeing, as it faces the Russian juggernaut. Granting Reparations and fixing our biggest and most longstanding divide can help avoid the same fate, for all of us, whites included.

Permalink to this post